Computer nostalgia - Post your relics!
- Thread starter OVERKILL
- Start date
yup.. that's awesome.. That reminds me.. I have the Apple //e with the (12" or 13"green text) Monitor /// (was for the apple ///) in storage! forgot all about that.
The oldest box of DS/HD 3.5" floppies I own from circa 1990 that specifically mentions PS/2 compatibility on the box. Now that I think of it I don't own any 720k floppies.
When the cassette tape drives wouldn’t load, you’d have to fiddle with the volume control to get it to load. Spent a few planning periods trying to get Oregon Trail to load.
Not hardware, but my Dad has a favorite Bridge card game that originally came on a low-density 5.25" disk. I still have it running for him under DOSBox. The file dates are from 1986!
About 2 months ago I pulled out my Latitude D610 and managed to get Windows ME on it after reinstalling it to without ACPI PnP bios support I managed to get it running with work DMA for the HDD controller, Played through GTA Vice City on it, I was testing Vice City on another computer and I copied the save files I was using and found out about there is a known bug that the game can potentially corrupt the save file after completing the Distribution mission, aparently it doesn't entirely corrupt the save it just makes the game crash if it's running on an NT based system but it'll work fine running on a 9x system.
Ah the joys of the 24 bit address, yeah very rare a 16bit system could handle larger than 4mb simms
Unlike most computers later IBM 286 systems would “see” more than the 16mb limit but anything beyond 16mb was only available as expanded memory and depending on your expansion cards a good chunk 1.375mb of that 16mb extended ram was masked for video cards. (Unusable)
My experience is that most 286/386sx systems could not be expanded to the full 16mb generally 12mb was the real limit because of the dos memory hole.
A few machines could go to 14mb (on paper) if you turned off ram relocation but good luck finding a combination of ram that actually added up to that strange amount.
Many value systems didn’t support larger than 1mb simms making the limit 4 or 5mb depending on if you had a meg soldered to the board or not, some manufacturers didn’t even wire up the address lines making for major compatibility issues with certain expansion cards.
RAM holes were still a big problem up until the second iteration of Core2 chipsets, my T60 I pictured further up has 4GB installed, the 945 chipset has exactly 32bits of address space and but due to the way the memory mapped I/O is configured on the BIOS, only 3GB is accessible even in a 64-bit OS, I only have 4GB installed because DDR2 is worthless now and that puts all the RAM in dual channel, but back when the RAM still costed a decent amount it was typical that people would only install a 2GB module and 1GB module and run it in mixed dual channel mode where the first 2GB was accessed in dual channel but the last gigabyte had to be accessed in single channel.
I remember having to tell the Linux kernel when more than 16GB of RAM was installed with a kernel boot parameter, because it couldn't auto-detect memory above 16GB. That was in 1998-99 or so.
What system were you working with that had that much RAM?
Many systems, I worked for a company that offered "dedicated servers" in their own datacenter space.
Working with Linux systems > 16GB RAM in 1998 meant you were a very cool cat!
Are you sure it wasn't a little later than 1998-1999, the quad processor P3 Xeon servers I know of usually maxed at 16GB back then and I'm not even sure the RAM modules necessary to max them were even available at the time or if they were the prospect of buying 16 of them would have been astronomically expensive.
OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
Could have been HP Convex SPP2000's.
It probably was later than that, now that I think about it. I left that job in 2003 so it couldn't have been later than that.
16GB sounds more like late 01 to sometime in 03. in the 98-99 time frame, any person would have been very lucky to have seen a single system with 16GB RAM, even each node in HPC clusters probably didn't generally run anywhere near that.
You know.. the older you get.. the more the years just run together! I knew I was getting old when the songs that were new when I was in high school were getting played on the classic rock station!
There were a few companies like Compaq, HP, Tandem, and a few others that made large scale x86 servers during the 1990s based on the Pentium Pro. I don't remember the max RAM, but it was a LOT for back then, maybe 64GB.
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After thinking about it some more it was almost definitely linux kernel 2.0.x and it was definitely the mem= parameter I used to tell it how much memory the machine had. However, a Google search turned up nothing about this, not surprising since it's been at least 20 years since it was a problem. Maybe I should create a VM with an old Redhat version that uses kernel 2.0 and see how much memory it detects...
From what I can dig up, 2.0.x kernels apparently had a lot of problems detecting RAM above 64MB and you had to manually specify the size and aparently had another limit around 1GB through the 2.2.x kernels, the 2.4 kernel added support for PAE and raised the limit to 64GB, although that was the point it was committed to mainline RedHat may have made their own patching beforehand, and I'm not sure about non x86 ports.
